Just about every modern business uses email as one of their primary means of communication. Modern smartphones have helped with this by making email accessible while on the go.

This technology is also available to small businesses and those who have invested in Microsoft Small Business Server have been able to use multiple device types to accomplish this.

Windows Mobile, iPhone, Nokia business phones and even Google Android phones have the ability to integrate with the Exchange mail server out of the box without the need for any extra hardware or software.

Blackberry handsets on the other hand have been a different matter.

Many mobile phone retailers don’t usually point out that traditionally to get a Blackberry to work with an Exchange Server you need extra software, licenses and a whole extra server which is expensive just for a couple of phones.

This usually means a series of complicated workarounds or having to use an inferior replacement service that doesn’t quite do the same thing.

Until now.

The company that develop Blackberry, Research in Motion recently announced the release of Blackberry Enterprise Server Express

This is a cut down version of the full enterprise product (many of the features wouldn't be applicable to small businesses) but crucially it is able to run on an existing server that is already running the Exchange mail server.

The product is free and doesn't require any additional licensing.

Once installed email, calendars and contact sync are all available on the Blackberry device while out and about.

Any changes made on the device are visible in the mailbox when back in the office without any manual intervention.

We've already had a successful deployment of this with one of clients.

They currently have a broad mixture of devices and the Blackberry users have been frustrated at having a poorer experience than users with different devices so were keen to get the software installed as soon as it was available.

SInce it was new software we ran it in-house on a test server to ensure it all worked as expected before rolling it out to their live server.

If you'd be intererested in taking advantage of this new software release please get in touch.